‘The Silent Click’: Measuring the impact of online brand advertising in Europe

More than two in five (42%) Europeans exposed to online brand ads went on to visit the advertiser’s website, compared to industry-average Click-Through Rates of less than 1%, according to new research.

“The Silent Click” study, from Online Publishers Association Europe and comScore, looks at the impact on European users after their exposure to online brand advertising, including searches performed on the advertisers’ brands and visits to their websites.
The study also found that users exposed to online brand ads were also more engaged with the brand, spending significantly more time on the advertisers’ sites and viewing many more pages than those who did not see the ads.
The study concludes that online brand advertising does indeed make an impact over time, just as offline advertising does, and shows that CTRs are essentially a Direct Response metric, making them inappropriate for judging the long-term effectiveness of online brand advertising.
The study also shows that online ad effectiveness varies based on the type of site on which the ad runs.
In most of the 6 European markets covered in the study (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey), online brand ads seen on OPA Europe member sites have greater impact than those seen on other publishing sites or on portals.
Current OPA Europe President Tomasz Józefacki of Agora commented: “Everyone agrees that Click-Through Rates have gotten really low, yet they keep using this metric to measure online ad campaigns, and then complain that online branding ads don’t work. Our research shows something very different: that there are other, more pertinent metrics which prove that online brand advertising does indeed drive search behaviour and visits to brand websites as well as engagement with the brand. And advertisers now know that placing an ad on a high-quality publishing site makes that ad even more effective.”
For study results covering the aggregate of the 6 countries, please visit
http://www.opa-europe.org/resources/research/264-the-silent-click-building-brands-online-in-europe
(Individual country data is available only to OPA Europe members.)
www.opa-europe.org
www.comscore.com.
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